FOUNDER OF THE ART PARK AND THE ARKHSTOYANIE FESTIVAL Nikolay Polissky

The artist who made Nikola-Lenivets famous. Polissky visited the place of power for the first time in 1989. He painted oil landscapes for 10 years before he was inspired to place his artworks and installations in this area. In order to attract new creative forces and expand the audience, in 2006 he created the Archstoyanie festival here, which attracted other artists and the attention of the general public to Nikola-Lenivets.

After years of studying the Nikola-Lenivets area through painting, Nikolay Polissky suddenly came up with the idea of 'entering the landscape'. By presenting a huge army of snowmen on the snow-covered bank of the Ugra River, he decided to turn their stand into reality and asked the locals to make two hundred pieces. In 2000 the first project, Snowmen, appeared, which marks the beginning of the Nikola-Lenivets art park.

Nikolay Polissky creates all his works together with the society of village artists - Nikola-Lenivets Crafts. He calls them his co-authors and explains that without them nothing would have happened. They faithfully follow him wherever the artist and his village assistants are invited. Nikolay Polissky and the Nikola-Lenivets Crafts artists together created projects in Russia, in the cities of Europe, Asia and represented the national pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2008.

The monumental works of Nikolay Polissky are distinguished by a grand scale and harmony, or, in the words of the author himself, for its harmony with the surrounding nature. After almost 20 years of creative work in Nikola-Lenivets, Nikolay Polissky is considered to be the founder and almost the only representative of the Russian land-art movement, art set outside of the exhibition walls, in dialogue with the surrounding landscape.